Early Man Findings Contradict Evolution

Not only has man always been man, he could not have lived as many years ago as claimed.

With discoveries that various species of “Homo” interbred, the evolutionary story of their progress upward to modern man has already unraveled (1/03/14). Now, it’s becoming even more implausible to think humans gradually ascended from stupid to smart over hundreds of thousands of years.

In Current Biology, Jean-Jacques Hublin summarized the fight between lumpers and splitters in paleoanthropological taxonomy: “The bushy nature of the human evolutionary tree in the past 3 million years is widely accepted. Yet, a spectacular new fossil of early Homo has prompted some paleoanthropologists to prune our family tree.” But if the tree is bushy, it doesn’t matter how you lump or split it: it’s not the picture Darwin predicted.

PhysOrg reported a fossil claimed to be an ape-like Paranthropus that was supposedly evolving into Homo erectus, but if there was gene flow between Homo erectus and Neanderthals—as is now believed—it creates a severe break between the first two links. Moreover, the feet of the specimen show that this ape spent most of its life in the trees. It went extinct, the article says, not evolving into a human line.

A new mitochrondrial genome from a fossil in Spain said to be 300,000 years old, announced in Nature, continues the trend: “Here we determine an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos and show that it is closely related to the lineage leading to mitochondrial genomes of Denisovans.” They could not decide between four “scenarios” to explain the “unexpected link” of this old fossil with more modern ones.

Science Daily reported on research at Notre Dame that showed diet in rabbits can have a profound effects on skull shape, leading the scientists to warn of caution when interpreting remains. “By being able to track the extent to which morphological changes in the cranium track (or do not track) dietary changes, we were also able to evaluate the extent to which skeletal structure can be used to infer behavior in the fossil record, a common assumption that surprisingly is largely untested,” they said. This could mean that some skull features are not evolutionary phenomena, but traits modified by the locally-available food type.

Live Science focused on the difficulty of getting ancient DNA free of contamination. “The DNA of a Neanderthal found in a Siberian cave has been sequenced, thanks to a new technique that weeded out contamination from modern humans.” Prior to the new technique, “Many of the most important fossils are contaminated,” the article said.

Science Magazine reported two papers that agree Neanderthals shared genes with modern humans, but claims most of the genes were disease genes that modern humans have been eliminating by purifying selection. About 1% to 3% of Neanderthal DNA remains in the human genome, Ann Gibbons said, claiming that Neanderthals and modern humans were at the “edge of incompatibility” genetically. The BBC News flatly declared that “Neanderthals gave us disease genes,” but then quoted a researcher saying “We found evidence that Neanderthal skin genes made Europeans and East Asians more evolutionarily fit.” Science Daily also gave the new interpretation, adding that Neanderthal genes are probably largely absent from African populations, because the two populations did not interbreed (but data are lacking). Still, since they did not hybridize, they were interfertile – surprising after 500,000 years of separation in the evolutionary timeline. See also the summary in Nature News by Ewen Callaway, “Modern human genomes reveal our inner Neanderthal.” Another article on Live Science says up to 20% of the human genome is Neanderthal, and some of it was beneficial. With no knowledge of marriage practices in these groups of human beings, New Scientist assumed the genetic sharing was due to “hanky-panky.” It would seem, though, that thriving offspring that spread these genes widely would presuppose stable family structures.

Researchers in Spain were surprised to find that pigments used in cave paintings did not change for some 6,000 years, even though the humans were transitioning during that time from hunter-gatherers to farmers (Science Daily). If they were smart enough to farm, were they not smart enough to invent new artistic media for some 3,000 years?

A separate finding reported by Live Science and Science Daily further strains the evolutionary dates. Could it be that at least 240,000 years before the Neanderthal-modern human “hanky panky” began, early humans were using the same campfires? Fire pit remains in an Israel cave show continuous use of fire in the same spot. The probability that family units were gathering regularly would seem to show enough intelligence and culture to strain credulity that nothing more interesting happened for so long. To rescue the evolutionary story, they had to put the evolution further in the past: “The researchers think that these findings, along with others, are signs of substantial changes in human behavior and biology that commenced with the appearance in the region of new forms of culture — and indeed a new human species — about 400,000 years ago.” Science Daily topped that with the opening line, “Humans, by most estimates, discovered fire over a million years ago.“

In all, these stories show the same pattern common to most fossil remains: abrupt appearance, stasis, and extinction or survival with little change. No one is claiming that humans shared genes with Paranthropus or the other ape-like fossils; a large genetic gap seems evident there. But there appears to be a single interfertile Homo sapiens population that makes the distinctions academic between the artificial labels Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis and others. Moreover, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that people with the mental and bodily equipment to be our peers, shaping tools and making art, never thought of anything better to do than hunt and sit around cave campfires for 300,000 years, 400,000 years, or a million years.

Here’s what you do to demonstrate the craziness of the evolutionary mythical timeline. Get a 10-foot rope. Stretch it out before the audience and call it a one-million-year timeline. Mark one foot near the end; that represents 100,000 years ago. Mark one tenth of that (1.2″); that represents 10,000 years ago. About half an inch on the rope would represent all of recorded history – time we can document from the earliest language records. As the audience looks on in astonishment at the tiny fraction of recorded history compared to the assumed evolutionary time, remind them that in the time represented by that half inch, humans went from simple villages to the moon, invented rockets and computers, created the Library of Congress and the internet, wrote the vast corpus of classical music, generated great art, explored almost every inch of the planet, built science stations in Antarctica, created smart phones and monster trucks and genetically-engineered crops and rodeos and zoos and space stations. During those 6,000 years, the population has skyrocketed, and populations have scattered around every island, fought major wars, competed for major projects. The Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, everything we read about in History of Civilization took place. Rub it in till it hurts, then show them the rest of the rope and ask, “Do the evolutionists really mean to tell us that our equals—physically and mentally—sat around cave campfires for nearly a million years, with nothing better to do? That not a single individual in all that time thought of riding a horse, planting a farm, or inventing a wheel, or finding a way to write down their language? The idea is so absurd it is surprising more people are not laughing their heads off at the story. We know what people are like. We know our curiosity, our intelligence, our wanderlust. We know that there’s always a substantial strain of dreamers who are not content with the same old, same old all the time, year after year after 100,000 years.

Some deep rumination on the facts should powerfully argue for a youthful human race. The burden of proof should be on the moyboys to explain why it is not stupid to believe in long ages. (Notice that theistic evolutionists, day-age creationists and progressive creationists deserve the same reproach.) If you believe the creation is young, stop being so sheepish, acting embarrassed in your attempts to explain why you doubt what “scientists” say about the age of the earth. Go on the offensive! You have logic and common sense on your side. You have empirical documented history on your side. Think about that rope timeline long enough, think about the Darwin myth that depends on that time, and you will erupt in howls of laughter. Let them blush. It will be a new experience for them, long overdue.